Qualtrics_3 steps to turn CX insights into business impact.pdf

CX insights into business impact

1. 3 steps to
turn CX
insights into
business
impact

2. Introduction
Step 1 // Investigate what the latest consumer trends mean for you
Step 2 // Collaborate for organization-wide alignment and impact
Step 3 // Validate evidence for executive buy-in
What’s next?
3
6
11
16
20
CONTENTS

3. Introduction

4. 4
In customer experience, taking these steps will help you
gain the support you need to drive meaningful business
impact this year.
Our 2024 Global Consumer Trends Report revealed four
surprising, data-driven customer experience (CX) insights:
+ Human connection is the foundation of a winning
AI strategy
+ Great service beats low prices in the battle
for customer loyalty
+ Digital support is the weakest link in your
customer journey
+ Consumers don’t give feedback like they used to...
so companies must listen in new ways
INVESTIGATE. COLLABORATE. VALIDATE.

5. 5
But these are cues to act, not outright solutions. Translating those
trends into positive change that drives business impact requires a
focused, clear strategy. For leaders across the customer experience –
contact center, digital, and physical retail locations alike – that means
digging into the DNA of your business to complete three key steps:
And, for each step, we will help you understand:
To that end, this guide is your CX playbook for the year ahead –
your toolkit to drive excellence.
Three important steps; three key questions; one revenue-driving,
business-critical action plan.
Investigate

Collaborate
Validate
what the latest consumer
trends mean for you
for organization-wide
alignment and impact
evidence for
executive buy-in
+ Why is this step important?
+ How can you do this effectively?
+ What does success look like?
STEP 1
STEP 2
STEP 3

6. 6
Investigate what the latest
consumer trends mean for you
Adding context to consumer behavior
STEP 1

7. 7
You don’t need a PhD to play chess, but it
helps to know how the pieces move.
Or, in other words: understanding consumer
trends is mission-critical for identifying areas
for improvement, but when deciding to act,
you need to prioritize what’s relevant for
your organization.
Without this due diligence, you set yourself up
to waste time, energy, and staff resources in
order to course correct.
Accomplishing this means drilling down into
specific metrics that matter to your business.
Not all metrics are created equal, and some
tell richer stories than others.
Combining operational metrics with
experiential ones can often reveal what
individual data points can’t. For example:
Is there a correlation between customer
effort score and average spend? You’ll only
know if you explore the right data.
WHY IS THIS STEP IMPORTANT? HOW CAN YOU DO THIS EFFECTIVELY?

8. 8
First, try to answer a few key questions of
your organization’s commonly tracked metrics:
DO YOUR STAKEHOLDERS ACTUALLY VALUE THEM?
If not, why not? It’ll either be that the metric doesn’t matter,
or that you need to better communicate its importance.
WHAT KEY MEASUREMENTS CAN EVERYONE GET BEHIND?
Which KPIs can cross departmental boundaries and
unite disparate teams? And is everyone tracking them
with the same tools?
HOW OFTEN DO YOU DISCUSS METRICS?
Getting together to discuss influential metrics is
a powerful way to surface what’s really important
across your business.
Then, it’s time to assess the trends in the context of your organization:
IDENTIFY WHICH METRICS REPRESENT EXPECTED CHANGES IN CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR
If the trend is that digital support is a weak link in the customer journey, how would
that show up in customer behavior?
RUN AN AUDIT OF THE METRICS YOUR ORGANIZATION ALREADY TRACKS
Are you already tracking the customer behaviors you expect to be impacted by
the trend? If so, ensure you have access to this data. If not, determine how you can
estimate this behavior. If metrics currently being tracked don’t actually correlate with
operational or financial metrics, it’s time to revisit them.
ASSESS THE TRENDS IN THE CONTEXT OF YOUR ORGANIZATION
Are you seeing a significant amount of customer churn due to broken experiences?
Is a significant portion of your support volumes due to inadequate digital support?
How much do you estimate this is costing your organization?
This investigative thinking will help you identify the trends that matter most for
your business – and why consumer behavior is the way it is.

9. 9
Great service beats low prices in
the battle for customer loyalty
+ Are satisfied customers less likely to churn than those
who aren’t? By how much?
+ Are customers who participate in promotions more
likely to churn? By how much?
+ Among customers who churn, what are their reasons
for leaving? What is the percent breakdown of these reasons?
+ What factors result in a greater willingness to pay?
By how much?
TREND
EXAMPLE INVESTIGATIVE QUESTIONS

10. 10
Winning at this stage means assessing what impact these trends are
having on your organization, as evidenced by your customers’ behavior.
Understanding why current metrics are in use by particular stakeholders
is key. Even if they don’t seem to correlate well with overall performance,
it’s worth finding out and gaining agreement before radically changing
scorecards. This will build up some goodwill before you try to drive change
using your new insight-to-action framework.
In practical terms, that means honing in on insights that might upend
previous ways of thinking. So for example, this might be…
Customers who pay full price are x% less likely to
churn than those who redeem pricing promotions
Customers who have a bad customer support
experience are x% more likely to churn than
other customers
x% of support volumes are from customers who tried
to address issues via digital support portal but failed
An online retailer that has historically spent more time delivering discount
promotions than investing in contact center resources, for instance, might
learn that the latter can be more powerful than the former at influencing
customer retention.
WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE?

11. Collaborate for organization-wide
alignment and impact
Bring teams together to build new solutions
STEP 2

12. 12
You won’t get very far if everyone’s heading in different directions.
Separate strategies and scorecards don’t lend themselves to
lasting change. A lack of business-wide buy-in often results in
overlooked insights, siloed impact, and unrealized potential.
Collective buy-in, on the other hand, is worth much more than
the sum of its parts. The bigger the team and scope of influence,
the bigger the impact you’ll make.
Whether you head up a contact center, a digital experience team,
or physical locations, the onus is on you to pull everyone together
and connect the dots.
Look around the business and assemble a dream team. The aim is
to identify collaborators who care about the relevant metrics you
identified in step one – those who are already working to improve the
customer experience, and those you’ll need on your side to enable
tangible improvements.
These people might cover a whole range of departments and expertise,
including pricing & promotions, marketing, customer service, digital,
product teams, financial planning and analysis, sales, account
management, and more.
Let’s say, for example, you’re digging into whether your customer
experience really does trump aggressive pricing for your business.
That would need insight and collaboration from people across pricing,
marketing, and customer service.
WHY IS THIS STEP IMPORTANT? HOW CAN YOU DO THIS EFFECTIVELY?

13. 13
Here’s what’s key: Once you have everyone you need around the
table, your goal is to agree on an approach to take action on the insight.
To help you evaluate and prioritize these approaches, focus on
solutions that are:
FEASIBLE GIVEN THE AVAILABLE RESOURCES
Can this be done at all? Within a reasonable timescale?
Does it meet with any outside pressures such as regulation?
SUSTAINABLE
Almost anything can be done as a one-off, but positioning something
as an ongoing improvement will often mean changing current processes,
budgets, and effort.
ALIGNED WITH YOUR BRAND VALUES
If you’re a premium provider in your marketplace, then something like
excessive discounting won’t sit well with your brand values. Equally, if
you focus on mass-market appeal, highly personalized and customized
experiences may feel out of kilter with your overall brand approach.

14. 14
PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE: IMPROVING CUSTOMER SERVICE
If we’re diving deeper into the consumer trend that digital
support is likely to be the weakest link in your customer journey,
for example, your work with the team might result in a statement
that helps make changes to the way you prioritize interactions.
“Based on the fact that 35% of our support volumes are from
customers who originally tried to address the issue on their own,
we recommend that the organization expands the approach to
digital support with an AI-powered triage system for customer
queries so customers can self-serve to get simple everyday tasks
solved quickly, leaving agents free to help priority customers.
This will keep down unnecessary service costs and boost
customer satisfaction.”
When you’ve done this well, you’ll arrive at a bulletproof statement that
all of your key stakeholders from step two agree on:
WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE?
[insight]
[resource ask, action plan]
[provide new experience]
[projected positive change]
Based on
enabled by
we recommend
the organization
resulting in

15. 15
For department leaders, improving CX is far from a zero-sum game – but you get
out what you put in. In other words? Business-wide buy-in and collaboration are
mutually beneficial:
IF YOU MANAGE RETAIL LOCATIONS…
Working more closely with contact center and digital team managers
can help you reduce strain on your in-store staff, and fill in knowledge gaps.
IF YOU’RE A CONTACT CENTER LEADER…
You can share common customer concerns and trends with location and
digital team managers to help provide more consistent support across
customer touchpoints.
IF YOU’RE A DIGITAL LEADER…
You’ll have insights on customer behavior that can help location and
contact center managers plan their staffing and training.
WORKING AS A TEAM

16. Validate evidence
for executive buy-in
How to build a case for CX-improving action
STEP 3

17. 17
Without buy-in from the top, you’ll have an uphill struggle on your hands.
Making changes that push the customer experience forward typically
requires new or rearranged resources, budget, software, and people –
so it can’t be done solo, or from a single department.
Senior stakeholders typically appreciate an approach that includes:
+ Action plans with recommended resource support
+ Accountability via Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
+ Business-wide awareness and reporting
+ Clearly defined departmental and organizational impact
+ Evidence for why they should believe your initiative will deliver results
What’s crucial here is that you can take what you’ve learned so far
and use it to build an ironclad case – one that shows that the proposed
solution will actually deliver the intended results and builds confidence
that you can deliver.
WHY IS THIS STEP IMPORTANT?

18. 18
Ok, let’s gather ourselves some indisputable evidence.
A great way to do this is to test a hypothesis using a control group and
a treatment group. The former receives the status quo, while the latter
experiences ‘new world’ CX based on the change you agreed on with your
collaborators in step two.
What you learn from this is exactly what you’ll build your case with for
executive buy-in. Get it right, and you’ll have validated that changes are
needed – and that outcomes are impactful.
HOW CAN YOU DO THIS EFFECTIVELY?
PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE: IMPROVING CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Here, your treatment group may be a small team of
customer support agents trialing new, AI-powered software
that delivers personalized, in-the-moment prompts.
You’ll want to compare the customer behavior and
experience metrics that you prioritized in step one of the
treatment group against the control group. Do customers
dealing with this subgroup go on to spend more? Do they
churn less frequently? Do they have better CSAT scores?

19. 19
If your hunches were right, you’ll end up with some solid evidence for
the statement we drew up in the previous step:
It sounds simple, but there’s power in that simplicity. If you’ve put the
work in and turned insight into business impact, then your CX strategy
will be seriously hard to ignore.
And remember: Evidence is a dish best served hot. Build a case with fresh,
up-to-date data, and present it alongside your fellow collaborators before it
becomes yesterday’s news.
WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE?
[description of outcomes
from hypothesis experiment]
our evidence
for this is
[insight]
[resource ask, action plan]
[provide new experience]
[projected positive change]
Based on
enabled by
we recommend
the organization
resulting in

20. What’s next?

21. 21
MORE RESOURCES
You’ve got four consumer trends, three steps to run them through,
and three key questions to answer for each. The goal is to figure
out which trends become actions that make the greatest impact
for your business and your customers.
Thing is, the customer experience is never a solved problem –
it’s an ongoing, iterative process that relies on adaptable strategies
and the ability to keep an ear to the ground at all times.
IN SHORT: EXECUTE, TEST, LEARN, ITERATE, VALIDATE, REPEAT.
How to turn consumer
trends into business impact
WEBINAR
WATCH NOW >
Customer Experience
Value at Risk
CALCULATOR
CALCULATE YOUR RISK >
2024 Global
Consumer Trends
REPORT
LEARN MORE >

22. 22
The future of CX is being built on the back of smart software
that can help teams pair AI abilities with deeply human
sensibilities – and empower your people across digital, physical
locations, and the contact center all at once.
Qualtrics offers a range of tools built for
continuous improvement, innovation,
and positive results.
LEARN MORE
THE RIGHT TOOLS CAN HELP, OF COURSE.